Coffee and Clear Skin

Posted: 21 February 2019

As I write this, I am feeling even better about my several-mugs-per-day intake of coffee because, yet another study has revealed positive benefits of drinking coffee. We know coffee has many health attributes: research shows that coffee is good for you, and Harvard scientists and the World Health Organization concur.

Previous research has reported that drinking coffee is associated with a longer life and lower risk of an early death. A study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine in July 2018, for example, found that people who drink more coffee have a lower risk of death even if they drink eight or more cups per day, and even if their genetics make them slow to process caffeine. The study looked at 500,000 people in the United Kingdom, of whom 387,494 were coffee drinkers. The results suggested that people who drank two to five cups of coffee in a day were about 12% less likely to die than non-coffee-drinkers over the 10-year period in the study. People who drank six to seven cups were 16% less likely to die, and people who drank eight or more cups were about 14% less likely to die.

Furthermore, the US National Coffee Association’s Scientific Advisory group tracked dozens of independent studies on coffee and health over the last couple of years evidencing that coffee has positive effects on the heart, liver, brain, and more, but I’ve never heard any correlation between coffee and “clear skin” — until now. I recently came across a study published in JAMA Dermatology in October 2018 that reported an inverse association between caffeine intake, particularly from coffee, and risk of incident rosacea, a common skin disease of which a leading symptom is redness.

The study of more than 82,000 participants with more than 1.1 million person-years of follow up, found that higher caffeine intake was associated with lower rosacea risk after adjustment for several confounders. Overall, participants who drank four cups of coffee per day were less likely to develop rosacea compared with participants who did not drink coffee. A dose-response association was found for both increasing caffeine and coffee intake. The authors hypothesized that caffeine’s vasoconstrictive and immune suppressive effects might decrease the risk of rosacea.

While this study may seem unimportant or low on the grand “health benefits of coffee scale,” the results might appeal to the younger Gen Z consumers – those individuals born between after 1997 – for whom coffee is not their first beverage of choice. This generation prefers unflavoured bottled water — it’s their top beverage choice. The NCA’s 2017 National Coffee Drinking Trends (NCDT) Study reported that coffee was not the most popular beverage sampled among Gen Z participants (in the previous day), but 70 percent of the coffee that was consumed was gourmet. Tea consumption was higher than coffee per past day levels. (See “Move Over Millennials — It’s Time to Pay Attention to Gen Z” in T&CTJ May 2018).

Gen Z may not care about most of health benefits coffee offers given their current ages, but what teenager doesn’t desire clear skin? Gen Z consumers are interested in sustainability, authenticity and the story behind the product. They will gravitate towards brands that share not only information about the product but where it came from and who created it. So, a sustainable, authentic product that tells a story and may aid in having “clear” skin? Sounds like a win/win/win for coffee and Gen Z.